The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (37 page)

Rivera, the Puerto Rican mechanic, looked up grinning as Tom and Chub approached, and stuck a bleeder wrench into the top pocket of his coveralls.

“She says ‘Signalo,’ ” he said, his white teeth flashlighting out of the smear of grease across his mouth. “She says she wan’ to get dirt on dis paint.” He kicked the blade of the Seven with his heel.

Tom sent the grin back – always a surprising thing in his grave face.

“That Seven’ll do that, and she’ll take a good deal off her bitin’ edge along with the paint before we’re through. Get in the saddle, Goony. Build a ramp off the rocks down to the flat there, and blade us off some humps from here to the bluff yonder. We’re walking the dipper up there.”

The Puerto Rican was in the seat before Tom had finished, and with a roar the Seven spun in its length and moved back along the outcropping to the inland edge. Rivera dropped his blade and the sandy marl curled and piled up in front of the dozer, loading the blade and running off in two even rolls at the ends. He shoved the load towards the rocky edge, the Seven revving down as it took the load,
blat blat blatting
and pulling like a supercharged ox as it fired slowly enough for them to count the revolutions.

“She’s a hunk of machine,” said Tom.

“A hunk of operator, too,” gruffed Chub, and added, “for a mechanic.”

“The boy’s all right,” said Kelly. He was standing there with them, watching the Puerto Rican operate the dozer, as if he had been there all along, which was the way Kelly always arrived places. He was tall, slim, with green eyes too long and an easy stretch to the way he moved, like an attenuated cat. He said, “Never thought I’d see the day when equipment was shipped set up ready to run like this. Guess no one ever thought of it before.”

“There’s times when heavy equipment has to be unloaded in a hurry these days,” Tom said. “If they can do it with tanks, they can do it with construction equipment. We’re doin’ it to build something instead, is all. Kelly, crank up the shovel. It’s oiled. We’re walking it over to the bluff.”

Kelly swung up into the cab of the big dipper-stick and, diddling the governor control, pulled up the starting handle. The Murphy Diesel snorted and settled down into a thudding idle. Kelly got into the saddle, set up the throttle a little, and began to boom up.

“I still can’t get over it,” ’ said Chub. “Not more’n a year ago we’d a had two hundred men on a job like this.”

Tom smiled. “Yeah, and the first thing we’d have done would be to build an office building, and then quarters. Me, I’ll take this way. No timekeepers, no equipment-use reports, no progress and yardage summaries, no nothin’ but eight men, a million bucks’ worth of equipment, an’ three weeks. A shovel an’ a mess of tool crates’ll keep the rain off us, an’ army field rations’ll keep our bellies full. We’ll get it done, we’ll get out and we’ll get paid.”

Rivera finished the ramp, turned the Seven around and climbed it, walking the new fill down. At the top he dropped his blade, floated it, and backed down the ramp, smoothing out the rolls. At a wave from Tom he started out across the shore, angling up towards the bluff, beating out the humps and carrying fill into the hollows. As he worked, he sang, feeling the beat of the mighty motor, the micrometric obedience of that vast implacable machine.

“Why doesn’t that monkey stick to his grease guns?”

Tom turned and took the chewed end of a matchstick out of his mouth. He said nothing, because he had for some time been trying to make a habit of saying nothing to Joe Dennis. Dennis was an ex-accountant, drafted out of an office at the last gasp of a defunct project in the West Indies. He had become an operator because they needed operators badly. He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field; for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the fields than they do in an office. Tom, trying so hard to keep his mind on his work, had to admit to himself that of all Dennis’ annoying traits the worst was that he was as good a pan operator as could be found anywhere, and no one could deny it.

Dennis certainly didn’t.

“I’ve seen the day when anyone catching one of those goonies so much as sitting on a machine during lunch, would kick his fanny,” Dennis groused. “Now they give ’em a man’s work and a man’s pay.”

“
Doin
’ a man’s work, ain’t he?” Tom said.

“He’s a damn Puerto Rican!”

Tom turned and looked at him levelly. “Where was it you said
you
come from,” he mused. “Oh yeah. Georgia.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Tom was already striding away. “Tell you as soon as I have to,” he flung back over his shoulder. Dennis went back to watching the Seven.

Tom glanced at the ramp and then waved Kelly on. Kelly set his housebrake so the shovel could not swing, put her into travel gear, and shoved the swing lever forward. With a crackling of drive chains and a massive scrunching of compacting coral sand, the shovel’s great flat pads carried her over and down the ramp. As she tipped over the peak of the ramp the heavy manganese steel bucket-door gaped open and closed, like a hungry mouth, slamming up against the bucket until suddenly it latched shut and was quiet. The big Murphy Diesel crooned hollowly under compression as the machine ran downgrade and then the sensitive governor took hold and it took up its belly-beating thud.

Peebles was standing by one of the dozer-pan combines, sucking on his pipe and looking out to sea. He was grizzled and heavy, and from under the bushiest grey brows looked the calmest grey eyes Tom had ever seen. Peebles had never got angry at a machine – a rare trait in a born mechanic – and in fifty-odd years he had learned it was even less use getting angry at a man. Because no matter what, you could always fix what was wrong with a machine. He said around his pipestem:

“Hope you’ll give me back my boy, there.”

Tom’s lips quirked in a little grin. There had been an understanding between old Peebles and himself ever since they had met. It was one of those things which exists unspoken – they knew little about each other because they had never found it necessary to make small talk to keep their friendship extant. It was enough to know that each could expect the best from the other, without persuasion.

“Rivera?” Tom asked. “I’ll chase him back as soon as he finishes that service road for the dipper-stick. Why – got anything on?”

“Not much. Want to get that arc welder drained and flushed and set up a grounded table in case you guys tear anything up.” He paused. “Besides, the kid’s filling his head up with too many things at once. Mechanicing is one thing; operating is something else.”

“Hasn’t got in his way much so far, has it?”

“Nope. Don’t aim t’ let it, either. ’Less you need him.”

Tom swung up on the pan tractor. “I don’t need him that bad, Peeby. If you want some help in the meantime, get Dennis.”

Peebles said nothing. He spat. He didn’t say anything at all.

“What’s the matter with Dennis?” Tom wanted to know.

“Look yonder,” said Peebles, waving his pipestem. Out on the beach Dennis was talking to Chub, in Dennis’ indefatigable style, standing beside Chub, one hand on Chub’s shoulder. As they watched they saw Dennis call his side-kick, Al Knowles.

“Dennis talks too much,” said Peebles. “That most generally don’t amount to much, but that Dennis, he sometimes
says
too much. Ain’t got what it takes to run a show, and knows it. Makes up for it by messin’ in between folks.”

“He’s harmless,” said Tom.

Still looking up the beach, Peebles said slowly:

“Is, so far.”

Tom started to say something, then shrugged. “I’ll send you Rivera,” he said, and opened the throttle. Like a huge electric dynamo, the two-cycle motor whined to a crescendo. Tom lifted the dozer with a small lever by his right thigh and raised the pan with the long control sprouting out from behind his shoulder. He moved off, setting the rear gate of the scraper so that anything the blade bit would run off to the side instead of loading into the pan. He slapped the tractor into sixth gear and whined up to and around the crawling shovel, cutting neatly in under the boom and running on ahead with his scraper blade just touching the ground, dragging to a fine grade the service road Rivera had cut.

Dennis was saying, “It’s that little Hitler stuff. Why should I take that kind of talk? ‘You come from Georgia,’ he says. What is he – a Yankee or something?”

“A crackah f’m Macon,” chortled Al Knowles, who came from Georgia, too. He was tall and stringy and round-shouldered. All of his skill was in his hands and feet, brains being a commodity he had lived without all his life until he had met Dennis and used him as a reasonable facsimile thereof.

“Tom didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Chub.

“No, he didn’t mean nothin’. Only that we do what he says the way he says it, specially if he finds a way we don’t like it.
You
wouldn’t do like that, Chub. Al, think Chub would carry on thataway?”

“Sure wouldn’t,” said Al, feeling it expected of him.

“Nuts,” said Chub, pleased and uncomfortable, and thinking, what have I got against Tom? – not knowing, not liking Tom as well as he had. “Tom’s the man here, Dennis. We got a job to do – lets skit and git. Man can take anything for a lousy six weeks.”

“Oh, sho’,” said Al.

“Man can take just so much,” Dennis said. “What they put a man like that on top for, Chub? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know grading and drainage as good as Tom? Can Tom stake out a side hill like you can?”

“Sure, sure, but what’s the difference, long as we get a field built? An’ anyhow, hell with bein’ the boss-man. Who gets the blame if things don’t run right, anyway?”

Dennis stepped back, taking his hand off Chub’s shoulder, and stuck an elbow in Al’s ribs.

“You see that, Al? Now there’s a smart man. That’s the thing Uncle Tom didn’t bargain for. Chub, you can count on Al and me to do just that little thing.”

“Do just what little thing?” asked Chub, genuinely puzzled.

“Like you said. If the job goes wrong, the boss gets blamed. So if the boss don’t behave, the job goes wrong.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Al with the conviction of mental simplicity.

Chub double-took this extraordinary logical process and grasped wildly at anger as the conversation slid out from under him. “I didn’t say any such thing! This job is goin’ to get done, no matter what! There’ll be no damn goldbrick badge on me or anybody else around here if I can help it.”

“That’s the ol’ fight,” feinted Dennis. “We’ll show that guy what we think of his kind of slowdown.”

“You talk too much,” said Chub, and escaped with the remnants of coherence. Every time he talked with Dennis he walked away feeling as if he had an unwanted membership card stuck in his pocket that he couldn’t throw away with a clear conscience.

Rivera ran his road up under the bluff, swung the Seven around, punched out the master clutch and throttled down, idling. Tom was making his pass with the pan, and as he approached, Rivera slipped out of the seat and behind the tractor, laying a sensitive hand on the final drive casing and sprocket bushings, checking for overheating. Tom pulled alongside and beckoned him up on the pan tractor.

“
Que pasa
, Goony? Anything wrong?”

Rivera shook his head and grinned. “Nothing wrong. She is perfect, that
‘de siete.’
She—”

“That what? ‘Daisy Etta’?”

“
De siete
. In Spanish, D-7. It means something in English?”

“Got you wrong,” smiled Tom. “But Daisy Etta is a girl’s name in English, all the same.”

He shifted the pan tractor into neutral and engaged the clutch, and jumped off the machine. Rivera followed. They climbed aboard the Seven, Tom at the controls.

Rivera said, “Daisy Etta,” and grinned so widely that a soft little clucking noise came from behind his back teeth. He reached out his hand, crooked his little finger around one of the tall steering clutch levers, and pulled it all the way back. Tom laughed outright.

“You got something there,” he said. “The easiest runnin’ cat ever built. Hydraulic steerin’ clutches and brakes that’ll bring you to a dead stop if you spit on ’em. Forward an’ reverse lever so’s you got all your speeds front and backwards. A little different from the old jobs. They had no booster springs, eight-ten years ago; took a sixty-pound pull to get a steerin’ clutch back. Cuttin’ a side-hill with an angle-dozer really was a job in them days. You try it sometime, dozin’ with one hand, holdin’ her nose out o’ the bank with the other, ten hours a day. And what’d it get you? Eighty cents an hour an’ ” – Tom took his cigarette and butted the fiery end out against the horny palm of his hand – “these.”

“
Santa Mariai
!”

“Want to talk to you, Goony. Want to look over the bluff, too, at that stone up there. It’ll take Kelly pret’ near an hour to get this far and sumped in, anyhow.”

They growled up the slope, Tom feeling the ground under the four-foot brush, taking her up in a zigzag course like a hairpin road on a mountainside. Though the Seven carried a muffler on the exhaust stack that stuck up out of the hood before them, the blat of four big cylinders hauling fourteen tons of steel upgrade could outshout any man’s conversation, so they sat without talking, Tom driving, Rivera watching his hands flick over the controls.